ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROAM

Are open-world games one genre or many? And where are they headed?

- CHRISTIAN DONLAN

Every work of art begins with a sheet of blank paper, and every sheet of blank paper offers one fundamental choice: portrait or landscape? For the past few generations, videogame developers have often chosen landscape, setting their adventures across sprawling maps that you can navigate as you choose, concentrating on the narrative or scattering to the distant hills just to see what might be hiding there. These are open-world games, and together we've spent millions of hours in places like this. We've collected Agility Orbs, stolen cars from strangers (and then backed over them), climbed towers to synchronise our viewpoints, and faced penalties for leaving the mission area – and really, could you judge us for that?

Open-world games have showcased design at its most luxurious, extravagant and intoxicating. They've given us the freedom so many videogames promise and struggle with. Forget building missions; why not build entire neighbourhoods in games such as Crackdown and let the mission flow where it will? Forget building ski runs; why not opt for Steep’s mountain range, individual slopes waiting to be chained together in new ways?

And yet 2025 sees open worlds themselves in a quandary. On one hand, the genre of choice is losing ground to newer, and perhaps less risky, options such as Soulslikes and Roguelikes. On the other, the biggest game in the history of the form is due to land in 2026, and it promises to deliver an open world created with the kind of lavish attention to detail that no other studio could afford. Many design teams are already scattering in the shadow of GTAVI, which won’t only recreate a huge stretch of Florida but also the modern milieu of social media and unnerving politics that flows through it. How can you compete with that?

This series’ impact is so great that, for many years, open worlds were synonymous with GTA, just as shooters were once known as Doomlikes. And yet